KickstarterForum.org

cfrei wrote:I just hired Funded Today to help me with my Kickstarter campaign and it was a TOTAL WASTE of $2,500. I don't recommend that you hire them and here is why.

1. You have no control over your brand or message as they don't let you see any of the Facebook ads before or during the campaign. So, you have no idea what message they are putting out, when, how or even if they are putting out all of these ads they are claiming to.
2. They don't use your Facebook account to place the ads, so you don't even get the advantage of driving people to your page or generating awareness or likes (if they aren't driving donations- which they didn't).
3. I honestly have no idea whether they placed 1 ad or 1,000 ads during the 7 days they claimed to have placed ads. I never saw an ad on Facebook, so as far as I am concerned, they took my money and that was it. When I ran a Facebook paid advertising campaign, I ran into my ads all of the time (as I am in the target audience). I never once saw an ad for my company or product.
4. There is no team. You work with one person (who was very nice) but basically for $2500, I got one 15 minute phone call, that was it.
5. Most importantly, they DON'T DRIVE DONATIONS. I don't trust that they did a thing. They run the company like a factory and sign up as many desperate people/companies as possible, take your money and make it look like they are doing something, when in fact, they aren't.

Those are my two cents. I hope this post helps the next person who considers hiring Funded Today. BTW, they wanted $3,500 for their service and I negotiated them down to $2,500.

Live and learn.

I am happy to talk to anyone offline about my experience if you are considering using Funded Today. Just email me at cfrei@calebscookingcompany.com

clutchit wrote:we hired funded today and they funded us but we lost money in the campaign because of their percentage

Stefan P wrote:I've tried Funded Today for my crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter.

The goods are they do have their own recipes to marketing crowdfunding projects. And the recipes work very well for some projects

The bads are their marketing strategic works for some not all and the cost is quite high. We had to pay around $3500 nonrefundable upfront fee for a thing called validation week. They said they would use this upfront fee to validating our product. Later I know they did it by using mostly facebook ads. Based on what i have seen and statistics on GA, they might have spent no more than 1/7 of the upfront fee. When the validation didn’t well, FT just canceled the contract and there is no refund. The pass rate is only 40%. Moreover, I didn’t even think the people who had ran the facebook ads for my campaign were really good at it. Just sensed it tho, they didn’t share any information about how they were running the ads.

At the end, we didn’t pass the validation week. So we decided to hire a freelancer to run facebook ads for us. We bought a list of around 1k Kickstarter super backers for $35 (with names, facebook url and id) from a guy on Fiverr, studying their behaviors, creating lookalike audience and running facebook ads ourselves. Fortunately, not all gigs on Fiverr are crap. Those ads brought up more revenue way more than what FT could.

I will definitely not use FT ever again. If you are gonna spend up to $3500 on facebook ads, just run it yourself or hire some really good one and take control of the whole situation. Because no one understands your product and cares about it better than you